Shailene Woodley in The Spectacular Now: Is It the Say Anything of 2013?

August, allegedly one of the year’s pop-cultural backwaters, is actually a great movie-going month. You get the supposed dregs of Hollywood’s summer blockbuster season: the B-movies and funky genre exercises deemed not quite commercial enough for May, June, and July. You also get the first hints of fall: films that are ambitious yet don’t necessarily meet the craven Oscar-bait standards of October, November, and Christmas. In other words, August movies, whether high or low, are often far more interesting than the year’s earlier or later fare. Two current examples are The Spectacular Now, an indie teen romance that aspires to be, maybe, its generation’s Say Anything; and Elysium, the big-budget dystopian action film that represents the final would-be blockbuster in Hollywood’s summer harvest—the last bushel of corn in the farmer’s multiplex.

Two very different films, but they also have two prominent things in common. One: both could be better, which, come to think of it, is true of most movies. More specifically, then: both are smart and idiosyncratic enough that they conjure their own better selves, as if sharper, wittier versions of what you’re watching might be playing simultaneously one auditorium over, or maybe on a future director’s cut on the Blu-Ray. I found myself rooting for them against their own odds, if that makes sense.

Two: whatever their failings, both movies were redeemed by above-and-beyond performances by actors with unusual names that begin with Sh-. So here’s to Shailene Woodley ofThe Spectacular Now and Sharlto Copley of *Elysium!*If there were Oscars in August, they’d be shoo-ins.

The nominal hero of The Spectacular Now is Sutter Keely, a glib, wise-cracking, self-proclaimed life of every party with a hot girlfriend. Basically, he’s Ferris Bueller, but instead of romping through a cynical-sentimental John Hughes comedy (one that, to my mind, perfectly captures the ethos of the Reagan years), Sutter is slowly brought to heel. His hot girlfriend dumps him, and worse, as he and we slowly realize, he’s an alcoholic who, while popular, is generally dismissed by his classmates as a buffoon. This presents two big challenges to the filmmakers (director James Ponsoldt, of Smashed, and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, of 500 Days of Summer, adapting Tim Tharp’s novel): avoiding teen-movie clichés and avoiding addiction-movie clichés. For the most part they succeed, telling their story with nuance, understatement, and a kind of offhand reality. Indeed, it’s tribute to that realism that this may be the first teen movie in Hollywood history where the actors are allowed zits and blemishes (although my eyes told me this led to a few continuity errors).

The film’s weakness: a third-act dip into predictable psychological revelations involving an absent father, slightly less predictable alcohol-vehicular interactions, and a far-too tidy ending. Another problem: the lead, Miles Teller (Project X, Rabbit Hole), while appealing, isn’t quite up to the simultaneous layering of charm, narcissism, anguish, and blithe assholery that the role demands, though in fairness, most actors wouldn’t be, aside from maybe the Marcello Maistrionni of La Dolce Vita.

But Shailene Woodley. She plays Sutter’s rebound girlfriend, Aimee Finicky, a pretty but mousey nice girl who blossoms under his attention. I have to confess I’m late to the Shailene party, having never seen The Descendants, the 2011 film in which she had a break-out role as George Clooney’s daughter, or the ABC Family series The Secret Life of the American Teenager, on which she has starred for the last five years, but I found her mesmerizing from her first scene in The Spectacular Now. Her Aimee is vulnerable but eager, possessed of a lovely inner light and a fragile outer shell, and sharper than she lets on. It’s another role with complex, conflicting shadings, and I would guess it’s much harder to play than Woodley, who can seemingly give the word “awesome” infinite meanings and inflections, makes it look. I’m not sure how else to praise the performance except to say that I can’t think of a more honest and natural movie teenager than Aimee, and that Woodley provides The Spectacular Now (awful title) with instant narrative tension because, of course, once she’s introduced, you spend the rest of the film fearing that Sutter and the film will break her heart.

Elysium has a terrific premise: in the 22nd century the one percent have fled a cruddy, crumbling earth for the titular space-station paradise—no longer are we humans all in the same actual boat. In theory, this represents as pregnant a twist on our present as Godzillaand Them were for an age of nuclear anxiety or Soylent Green was for a decade alarmed by pollution and overpopulation. Sadly, Elysium is all set-up; when the rubber hits the road and high-tech bullets start flying (bzzzzzztt! splatt!!) the movie settles into standard-issue sci-fi action-movie rhythms and tropes. This proves particularly disappointing when the mayhem finally crash-lands on Elysium itself, which, aside from great visuals, is surprisingly, dismayingly under-imagined. Who really lives there and what life might be like, its idiosyncrasies and satiric possibilities, are left unexplored. Instead, the last 30 minutes largely take place in the usual industrial-lab setting, with men in exoskeletons (shades of Iron Man, Avatar, and Pacific Rim) battling it out on hanging walkways over vertiginous industrial abysses. Even more unforgivably, the movie has a sappy ending. No Charlton Heston sinking to his knees in front of a half-buried Statue of Liberty or Harrison Ford left questioning his literal humanity.

The writer-director is Neill Blomkamp, whose first film was the much sharper District 9. Playing Elysium’s authoritarian secretary of defense, Jodie Foster is the main villain. She gives an odd, campy performance, as if someone told her she was voicing Ursula the Sea Witch. As her mercenary henchman, Sharlto Copley, who played the lead in District 9, steals every scene he’s in. We’ve seen his character before—an angry, amped-up baddie who lives for killing, maiming, and torturing; it is for him what spinach is for Popeye—but rarely have we seen this archetype played with such exhilarating gusto, as if the actor were tweaking on a film-long methamphetamine high. Blowing people up and hacking off limbs look like such fun in Copley’s hands, although he really shouldn’t punch women in the face, earning him . . . SPOILER!!!! . . . not one but two deaths.

Praise should also be given to star Matt Damon. He’s been so good in so many movies it’s almost easy to take him for granted, but maybe people took Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and John Wayne for granted in the 40s and 50s. Really, I think he’s that great a movie star. Here he’s in modified Bourne mode; no one, not Tom Cruise or Sean Connery or Clint Eastwood, is better at conveying thought and emotion—at being interesting—while running, leaping, or kicking ass.

One last August movie-going note: We’re the Millers is exactly as good as it needs to be, no more, no less. It exists in perfect equipoise—the Platonic ideal of a just-funny-enough-for-a-hot-summer’s-night R-rated comedy.